ACCU Menu

Advertisement

Advertisement

Membership

Login

ACCU Buttons

Add them to your site:

Search in Book Reviews

The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review.
The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers.
Currently there are 1918 reviews in the database and more every month.
Search is a simple string search in either book title or book author. The full text search
is a search of the text of the review.

Albeit being somewhat dated, I think this book is the best available
in its category. It discusses in detail most features of current
state-of-the-art Unix kernels, including SVR4.2, Mach, 4.4BSD, Solaris
2.x, which makes it a good follow-up to former books such as Bach's
Unix Internals.

Each chapter provides descriptions of several topics, with clear
diagrams and comparisons among different implementations. Code is
provided when discussing implementation issues, but in a brief and to
the point style.

At the end of each chapter, you can find a list of references to fathom
on the topics discussed. Exercises are also available, to provide food
for thought and consolidate the concepts learnt. Unfortunately there is
no answer book available.

The author starts with an overview of the evolution of Unix since
its inception to the current thicket of different flavours. Then it
describes processes related issues in traditional and modern kernels:
threads, signals, job control, scheduling, IPC and synchronization in
uniprocessor and multiprocessors.

Next chapters introduce the file system interface and the VFS concept,
detailing some specific implementations, to introduce you to distributed
fs and finally some advanced concepts such as journaling and stackable
fs. Then it starts with memory management from the kernel and user point
of view, provides a good description of VM and discusses implementations
in SVR4, Solaris, 4.4BSD and Mach.

Finally, it describes cache-related issues and its effects. The
last two chapters address the IO subsystem, discussing the traditional
framework (char and block devices), and STREAMS.

This is not an introductory book. You need some background in operating
systems concepts, such as virtual memory, processes, etc. which can be
learnt in introductory books for undergraduate courses such as Tanembaum's
Modern Operating Systems, Silberchatz, Stallings, etc.

If you are into operating system design, Unix programming or even
system administration, get this book you will not regret it. Highly
Recommended